The April issue is now online! We have some great features on:
– Three new books in Papiamento
– The Waves of Words Event
– Events Calendar has also two lectures and more
– Caribbean Writers Compete for the 2015 OCM Bocas Prize
– Newly arrived, Soon for sale books and much more.

Why writing doesn’t have to be a lonely struggle

Being an author is the most desirable job in Britain, according to a YouGov poll. Not so, responded Tim Lott. Writers are driven by demons, he wrote, the work is unimaginably hard – as complex as brain surgery, apparently – not to mention solitary, and fraught with rejection and professional envy. The meagre consolation is the “small legacy” we may leave behind us when we go. It’s a dismal prospect – enough to have us weeping over our keyboards, while taking nips from a bottle of absinthe.

Sorry Tim, but we have to disagree. That’s not how it is for every writer.

Take those demons, for example. For some of us, writing is not a matter of being driven by them, but casting them out. Difficult family relationships? Sort them out on the page. Horrible love life? Write it again with a better ending. Feeling your age? Slip into the skin of a 20 year old and go off and have some fictional adventures. It’s not a horrible, exhausting struggle; it’s therapeutic.